The baby vicuña ran down the dusty dirt road, going this way and that, trying to find a way out of the road and up the hill to where its parents were. The driver was unsympathetic, driving the baby down the road away from the others. Suddenly, out of the shadows, there rang a high-pitched voice,

“Isn’t it CUTE!!!”

The light changed and the new lighting showed that the speaker was my mother. We figured that she wasn’t talking about the driver, but we couldn’t be sure, so we kept our mouths shut. Eventually, the vicuña found a spot where it could scramble up the slope and all was well.

That is what happened during our full day tour in the Atacama Desert and Salar. We started out in a large van with the Australian man and women, another man from our hostel, a Bolivian woman, and a couple from London. We started out by going to a town where we saw some llamas and some hand knitted sweaters, blankets, and mittens. After that we went to some flamingo lakes out in the salt pans, and then went high up into the mountains.

After going far up and seeing two lagoons, we went back down, and that was where we saw what happened in the first paragraphs. Then we went down to the valley, ate lunch, and drove back to our hostel, where I played chess with David and Joy, his sister-in-law, the teacher.

That’s all for now, Folks!